Keep an online diary of your mug...every day

And by weird, I don't mean "bad" or "wrong." I just mean -- it's different -- and yet so right for our times.

I've been checking out DailyMugShot.com, a free online service where you either upload a head shot or take a picture with a web-cam.

If you do it the way the creators intended, you'll take a photo with a web-cam (because it's a quicker process), and your photo will be uploaded to the site, and you'll do this every day -- indefinitely. If DailyMugShot.com is around forever, you can take a photo for yourself every day and have it uploaded to the site -- for the rest of your life.

You, your friends and family (and any hangers-on) can then go to Dailymugshot.com and see the resulting slide show. If you do this for a year, for instance, you'll have 365 pictures of how you looked every single day. If you do this for years, you can, in a sense, literally watch yourself age. I know this because people have pictures on DailyMugShot.com, available for strangers like myself to see how they're looking from day to day.Obviously, there's something a little creepy about that, or perhaps narcissistic, and yet I can see where it would be helpful and healthy, too. It might be kind of nice to look back and say, "Wow, I really have been gaining weight these last couple years, or I finally get now why nobody seemed to like my haircut in 2007."

And I suppose one might even be able to look at their last few months more critically and notice that they're appearing gaunt or generally unhealthy, schedule a physical and wind up getting an early diagnosis just in time to combat an illness.

Conversely, it could be an inspiring tool if you're trying to lose weight or improve how you look in some other way.

And I can imagine how wonderful (or painful) it might be, for family members to see a relative stationed in Iraq, or for that soldier to check in on children born when they were stationed abroad, to see their progress. Bittersweet, indeed.

But if nothing else, DailyMugShot.com seems like the perfect site to complement Facebook, MySpace and Twitter pages. After all, so many people are now recording the significant and mundane moments in their lives, turning web pages into digital diaries. It seems appropriate that some people might want to forgo their inner selves for awhile and focus on the outer.